NMG and RSS Labs are busily working away at enterprise integration using RSS. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, more than a year ago, speaking of RSS as a way for enterprise applications such as ERP modules to feed Outlook and other aggregator software, thus connecting silos of information and enabling individuals to track business processes in real time.
Now the market is starting to warm up, as can be seen in this blog entry by CIO Magazine’s Christopher Lindquist:
RSS: All the Integration You Need?
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
CIO has been doing a lot with RSS feeds recently. In addition to making a number of them available for readers
to view, we use them internally to drive content to various parts of
our site without having to go through a lot of tedious hand coding or
direct database queries. The feeds function as a quick integration
method that has given us a lot of flexibility. (You could argue that
it’s integration in a single direction, but sometimes that’s enough.)
I also had a chat with NewsGator’s
founder Greg Reinacker a few weeks ago, and he mentioned that his
company was seeing some interest in RSS as a more enterprise-friendly
integration tool as well, though companies still had concerns about how
to create secure feeds safe enough for data more valuable than my “your
order has been processed” message from Castingwords.
It got me
wondering about creative ways to use RSS as an integration tool. It’s
standards-based, well understood, and rapidly being integrated into
every piece of software imaginable.
